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The New Shopping Cart Status Token

The launch of the new LightCMS Online Store is less than a week away and things are going well. We're so excited to bring these new features to you and we know you're going to love the new functionality they add to each LightCMS website.

To help you get ready for the big release, I wanted to offer a few details on a new design token we'll be adding to the system to support the integration of shopping cart functionality into your designs. In case you are not familiar, tokens are the small bits of code you can add to your HTML and CSS design files in order to integrate LightCMS's dynamic content management functionality into your own designs. Our token system makes LightCMS the most designer-friendly CMS around. If you need more information about tokens, you can see our Token Reference Guide.

(Quick side note: the LightCMS Token Reference Guide and all of our design documentation is getting an overhaul alongside next week's release. We're excited about that as well.)

Nothing New Required

First of all, it should be noted that no additional tokens or templates are required to make the store work with your existing LightCMS designs. The store will integrate seamlessly into your LightCMS websites automatically. You'll be able to add product listings to any region on any page of your site. The system will automatically generate styles for the layout of the product listings, product detail pages, shopping cart pages, and checkout screens.

However, it is nice to provide the user with convenient access to their shopping cart and checkout screens throughout the site. That's where the information discussed in this article comes in.

Provide Access Through Direct Links

You'll be able to link visitors to their shopping cart from anywhere on your site by simply creating a link with href="/shoppingcart". Likewise, you can link users to the checkout screen using a link with href="/checkingout". These direct links are nice, but what if you want to provide more dynamic feedback to the user about what is in their shopping cart? That's where the Shopping Cart Status token comes in.

The Token

This new token is one of the most robust and customizable tokens on the LightCMS system. It offers you the ability to integrate dynamic and information-rich feedback to the user about what they have in their shopping cart, as well as links to their shopping cart and/or to their checkout page.

The full spec of the token will be released on the new LightCMS support website at launch, but I will give you a brief overview here so you can have the concepts in mind.

By using the "cartfull" and "cartempty" states, you can inject HTML content into your pages based on whether the user has any items in their shopping cart. You'll also be able to use a handful of variables such as "item total," "money total," and "weight total" to insert dynamic values based on what the user has in their shopping cart. We've even included a "pluralize" function that will help you change words from singular to plural when needed.

One additional trick with this token -- it has a default configuration and provides a shortcut method for implementing this configuration. If you want to utilize the default configuration, all you have to do is insert <$shoppingcartstatus/$> into your code and you're done.

Full Details to Come

As mentioned, we've got full documentation on this new token on our new and improved LightCMS support website, which will be released next Wednesday so stay tuned!